FaithWorld

Pope Benedict XVI greets Muslim delegation head Mustafa Ceric (R), the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, at the Vatican on November 6, 2008/Osservatore Romano

A scandal over the sexual abuse of children by priests could harm the credibility of other religions as well as Roman Catholicism, a senior European Muslim leader says.

Mustafa Ceric, the spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim majority and a key figure in Christian-Muslim dialogue, told Reuters he hoped Pope Benedict would act decisively to tackle the paedophilia problem and prevent further harm.

“The Church is going through a very difficult time and I wish the current pope will be capable and up to the challenge that he is put in,” the grand mufti of Bosnia said in an interview on Wednesday. He stressed his reluctance to comment on what he called an internal matter for the Church.

“It is unfortunate not only for the Catholic Church but for any religious association, and the damage to the moral credibility of the Catholic Church is going to have consequences on the credibility of other religious communities as well.”

Abuse victim Gianni Bisoli in Verona April 8, 2010/Paolo Bona

Abuse victim Dario Laiti is deaf and has great difficulty speaking. But he has a clear message for Pope Benedict: expose predator priests, past and present, living and dead, for the good of the Church.

“I think the pope has to carry out justice. He has to get rid of all the priests who abused children. He has to tell the world who these people were and which of them are still living,” Laiti told Reuters in the northern Italian city of Verona.

So far, the pope has not spoken out directly on the new wave of sexual abuse allegations that is hounding the Church in a number of countries, including the United States, Italy and his native Germany.

Headlines are supposed to highlight the news, but sometimes the news is uncomfortable. Like the sexual abuse cases for the Roman Catholic Church. Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference, played down the big news in its front-page headline on Saturday about an  interview with the head of the Vatican office dealing with charges of sexual abuse against priests.

In the middle of the front page (at left), it ran the headline “Il ‘pm’ vaticano: in tutto il mondo trecento i preti accusati di pedofilia.” — Vatican public prosecutor: 300 priests accused of pedophilia in the whole world.”  That actually doesn’t sound like that many, given all the cases we’ve heard about all these years.

It’s only in the interview on page 5 that the real picture emerges. There the reader finds a much larger figure of  3,000 accusations of sexual misdeeds of all kinds made against priests since 2001, concerning cases dating back up to 50 years ago. That sounds more like it, although it still must be lower than the real number of cases because so many don’t get reported.

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland could well feel it has nowhere left to hide. As the press carried blanket coverage of this week’s meeting between the Pope and bishops summoned to Rome following the Irish church’s vast pedophilia scandal, Ireland’s national theater has joined those taking up the theme of ecclesiastical hypocrisy, to loud applause.

Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy’s new play “Christ Deliver Us!” at Dublin’s Abbey Theater is nominally set in the 1950s, but its topicality is startling. It does not directly accuse the church of paedophilia, but it is severely critical of sexual repression, corporal punishment and censure of minor teenage lapses. The theater itself underlines the parallels with the findings of two reports into child abuse by priests published in Ireland last year.

“We as a society are still reeling from the revelations of the Murphy and Ryan reports,” the theater said in a program note. “For this reason, it is an important play for the Abbey, as the national theater, to present now.”

It’s not every day that the Vatican newspaper suggests that a man accused of paedophilia and said to have converted to Islam might be immortal. But that’s what L’Osservatore Romano did today. In a tribute to Michael Jackson — itself another sign of the “new look” that editor-in-chief Giovanni Maria Vian has given it — the paper included him in a pop music heaven at an unusually earthly location:

“But will he really be dead? It wouldn’t be surprising if, in a few years, he was spotted in a gas station in Memphis, perhaps with his former father-in-law Elvis Presley, another of those myths – like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon – that never die in the imagination of their fans. And Michael Jackson, who died yesterday at the age of fifty, is definitely a pop music legend.”

The tribute reviews Jackson’s career, from the time “when he was still black” through his “humanly difficult … crossover” to “new genres not entirely attributable to any specific area, where one cannot distinguish between black and white.” It praises his mega-album Thriller “which is known also to those who do not frequent these musical worlds” and calls him a “great dancer” (grande ballerino).